Managing and retaining electronic content data has become increasingly important for business especially in light of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. One type of system that allows business to manage and retain their electronic content data is a content management system. Content management systems organize and facilitate the collaborative creation of documents and other content. Electronic content data can be created, secured, retained, destroyed, and monitored when using content management systems. Content management systems include a database for retaining the electronic content data managed by the system. Also, a records manager system is usually included within a content management system.
The conventional records manager system consists of a database having entries each associated with a respective electronic record. Typically, each entry includes fields which identify the title, author, publication date, subject matter, status, and location of the associated record. In addition, each entry may also include a record retention data field which identifies the time period after which the record should be archived to storage, and the time period after which the archived record should be destroyed.
Typically, record management systems have been used to manage libraries of paper or otherwise tangible documents. However, given the proliferation of electronic documents, such as word processing documents, spreadsheet documents, drawing documents and e-mail, attempts have been made to provide software solutions for managing electronic records, including their retention and disposal.
In addition to using content management and records manager systems to manage and organize electronic data, digital rights management systems offer businesses control on how electronic content data is used. These systems, referred to as Digital Rights Management (DRM) Systems, are able to restrict access to data sets by limiting authorization to one or more types of usages of a data set in response to specified usage conditions. Access control in these systems is controlled through specified Digital Property Rights (DPRs). An example of a DPR is a right to only read a particular media data set for a specified number of times. Such a DPR may be used to provide a free or low cost demonstration of the multi-media data set. Existing systems support a variety of conditions on usage of the media data set and those conditions may be specified on a remote license server, but the available types of usages that may be authorized are fixed by the implementation and may not be flexibly varied by the owners of the copyright on a media data set.
Even though the above described systems are useful, they are not without their short comings, drawbacks, and deficiencies. One problem with the prior art is that electronic content data downloaded onto a user's desktop is no longer managed by the record manager system. Even though the digital rights management system controls how the electronic data is used, it does not abide by the retention policies of the records management system. For example, a records manager sets a retention policy for an email at two years and at the end of the two years the email is to be deleted. The author of the email can set digital rights usage policy so that the email can be used indefinitely. Once a copy of the email is downloaded onto a user's computer, the two year retention policy no longer is applicable to the copy. The copy still exits even though email has been deleted from the records management system.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.